needles. vectors. words. laughter.

Germany, Part II: Bavarian Alps

Welcome to the second installment of my Germany trip in review, Bavarian Alps. We spent two nights but most of two days here, so I’ll split up my rambling as it makes sense.

Leaving Munich, Going up the Zugspitze

We left Munich via rental car, picked up at the main train station. (If you’re ever doing the same, realize the rental car places are up in an upper gallery, sort of by Burger King.) We got something besides a gray or black rental car, a dark brown Opal that served us quite well between its cargo space and amount of power. We drove straight to Garmish, where we were going to get the cable car up to the top of the Zugspitze.

So..yes, I still hate heights, but I went very close to the top of Germany’s tallest peak. You have two options to get up and down: one super long cable car, or a funicular train and short cable car combination. The single cable car is much faster but, for folks like me, more terrifying. I chose to get the long cable car out of the way first.Once at the top, the views are amazing though it is a serious temperature difference from the bottom. There’s little gift shops on both the German and Austrian side plus a few places to eat. We did lots of picture taking – and I did some freaking out about the height, even getting dizzy at one point – and ate a simple lunch of soup and sausages before heading back down.

Photos don’t need captions here, so I’ll just toss them in and then continue blathering in a bit.

Exploring Alpine Towns

We stayed in a little bed and breakfast in Garmish, the largest of the towns in that part of the German Alps. We were the only non-German guests but everyone was very nice and spoke enough English that we didn’t have to rely on Google Translate. It was really relaxing after the hustle-and-bustle of Munich, especially with what turned out to be the coolest weather of the trip and a lovely balcony off our room, overlooking the owner’s gardens.

Having the car, we took the chance to drive all over to nearby towns that Matt had researched. My notes aren’t super clear, but I can tell you we went to the following places/cities from our base in Garmish, in order: Mittenwald (best. ice cream. ever.), Obermmergau (where I bought some sock yarn and needles), Ettal (big abbey, good lunch across the street), Schloss Linderhoff (over-rated former home of “Crazy Ludwig”).

Apparently, I didn’t take any photos worthy of keeping while in Garmish. So, we’ll skip ahead..

…to Ettal

…to Schloos Linderhoff (no photos inside, but it was just all too ornate that I wouldn’t have taken any, anyway)

Germish to Rottenburg

I was going to put this in the Rothenburg post, we really enjoyed our time there so there’s tons of photos to share. Again, few notes from this part of the trip (think I got bored of my note-taking and was working on my socks, at this point). We stopped at lots of different places in a day: Weiskirche (Rococco cathedral), Schloss Harburg (castle which is mostly intact but which we didn’t pay extra to go inside), Nordlingen (where we wandered around quite awhile and I bought more sock yarn, at a place with the awesome name Woll Lust), and Dinkelbuhl (only note is that we ate ice cream).

[No clue where this was. No geotag as that’s actually a camera photo, not an iPhone photo.]

[Harburg Castle from it’s parking lot.]

[Views from the castle courtyard.]

Third post will be all about Rothenburg, which is corny, sure, but in a good way.